In Danta village, 15km from Bhilwara city, 30-odd women start filing in at 8.30 am daily to resume work on building a concrete water reservoir. The women are among the 2,000 people in the village who have got work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) since the scheme, promising 100 days of work a year to one adult member of every rural family, was launched two years ago...

For more than seven years, Babar Ali, 17, has been teaching children from poor families for free at a school he founded in a West Bengal village, while studying at another school. Ali opened the Ananda Shiksha Niketan at Gangapur village in Murshidabad district in 2002, when he was just nine. Today, the school has more than 800 students. Another 200 have applied to join in the next session—making it larger...

India’s love for peanuts is now such a mega trend that chikki and chivda are bigger Money-spinners than groundnut oil, the most expensive traditional cooking oil. The popcorn generation has morphed the peanut from a stodgy oil crop into the nation’s favourite snack food. But hasn’t the peanut always helped us live through moments of excitement and ennui? Isn’t the volume of peanut shell litter a uniquely Indian indicator of...

While the jury is still out on whether Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh did the right thing by putting a moratorium on the use of Bt brinjal, or whether he simply played to the gallery by only taking into account the concerns of the environmentalists, policy-makers need to ponder over some other implications. The introduction of Bt cotton, for instance, led to production more than doubling between 2002-03 and 2007-08, from...

Anxious to ensure fiscal discipline and manage financial resources for its flagship programmes, UPA-2 is considering deletion of the Above Poverty Line (APL) beneficiaries from the ambit of the proposed food security law. It seems garnering Money for UPA's pet promise of "food for all" is turning out to be a big headache as a note circulated for the Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) has argued in favour of mandating...